Name: Germany's massive refugee backlog
Uploaded: 2016-11-04T07:55:45.000Z
Duration: 2 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

For the last few months, the FT has been following the progress of three Syrian refugees into Germany

Nazir Wakil, Abudalaziz Dyab, and Ahmad Al Soliman

Past perfect

All three are fleeing civil war and had applied for asylum in Germany

Two had their applications accepted but Ahmad Al Soliman is still waiting to find out what his fate will be

His application for asylum was rejected, because in 2014, he was fingerprinted and registered against his will by police in Hungary

Which means Germany can claim that's where he should be living

This is his ID card. The red line indicates that he must leave the country if his appeal fails

So let's use Ahmad's case to look at how the asylum system is working in Germany

Germany's federal office for migration and refugees, the BAMF, publishes monthly stats on the number of applications made for asylum, and the number of asylum decisions made by the authorities

So you can think of this as a kind of process

Applications go in, decisions come out, which means a backlog can build up

In January 2014, there were over 14,000 applications, and more than 10,000 decisions

Let's look at how that picture changed over the next year and a half

Here are the number of decisions being made each month

Whenever the red line is hiding the blue line, it means there are more applications coming in than there are decisions coming out

By August 2016, that difference had grown to more than 40,000

At the beginning of 2014, the backlog was just under 100,000 pending applications

The number of pending applications has never dropped since February 2014

By August 2016, that number had grown to more than 565,000 applications

Now that Ahmad's case is being rejected, he's appealing in court

In the first half of this year, there were more than 32,000 asylum appeal cases heard by the courts

Fewer than 5% of them ended in a positive ruling in favor of the applicant

Ahmad is still waiting to hear what his outcome will be